Shooting draws ‘All-American boy’ to gun control cause

Indeed Goddard, 26, never thought much about the gun issue when he was a Virginia Tech student majoring in physics and drilling with the ROTC cadet corps.

Getting shot four times in the 2007 Virginia Tech campus rampage changed all that.

Colin Goddard has appeared on TV with Oprah Winfrey (Harpo Productions)

“I assumed we did everything we could to keep guns out of the hands of someone who should never have them,’’ Goddard said in his sunny Washington office at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “I was shocked to learn that we don’t.’’

These days Goddard lobbies lawmakers to require background checks for all gun sales, even private ones. Last year he went to Austin, Texas, to oppose a measure before the state legislature that would have permitted carrying concealed weapons on campus.

“It has a big impact when someone like Colin can come here and say `I was there, I was shot,’’’ said John Woods, a University of Texas at Austin graduate student who led opposition to the guns-on-campus bill.

Gun-rights advocates have their own Colin Goddards. One of them, Suzanna Hupp, lost her parents in the 1991 shooting at a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. She served 10 years as a Texas state representative and championed the idea that more guns — not fewer — are the solution to mass shootings.

In his lobbying visits, Goddard has recalled the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech events hundreds of times. But in each retelling, he seems transported back to those 10 minutes of French class on the second floor of Norris Hall, the building where the majority of shooter Seung Hui Cho’s 32 victims died.

He spares no horrific detail _ the rising crescendo of gun shots, scrambling for cover amid overturned desks, the smell of gun powder, gurgling sounds from a wounded classmate, a sea of shell casings on the floor, the first bullet’s impact like a swift kick above his left knee.

“It was that moment when I realized this is real, I just got shot, this is really happening,’’ he said.

Goddard never saw Cho’s face as he kept pulling the triggers of two handguns.

And it was only when police burst into the room and shouted “shooter’s down’’ that he realized Cho had saved the last bullet for himself.

Medical personnel determined that in addition to his left knee, Goddard had been shot in both hips and his armpit, with the final bullet exiting his right shoulder. He spent six days in the hospital in a morphine-induced haze.

Bullets remain in both hips and knee, and a titanium rod is implanted in his left thigh.

Cho, a fellow student, had a long history of mental health problems and had been ordered by a judge to receive outpatient psychiatric care.

But even though federal law bars gun purchases by anyone adjudicated as mentally ill, Virginia law required only that the names of those committed to mental hospitals be forwarded to the FBI’s background-check system. Because Cho had outpatient care, he passed the background check.

This loophole, plus the ease of evading the system entirely through private purchases, infuriated Goddard. But he had to recover from his wounds and graduate from college.

Born to parents working on international development projects, he grew up in foreign hotspots including Mogadishu, Bangladesh and Cairo. His family had breathed a sigh of relief when he enrolled at Virginia Tech astride the placid Blue Ridge Mountains.

Time went by and Goddard tried to get on with his life.

But he kept coming back to the shooting, especially while watching reports of subsequent rampages on TV news. Eventually Goddard called the Brady Campaign and told them, “I have to do something about this.’’

In addition to lobbying for background checks for all gun purchases, Goddard has traveled the nation on speaking engagements and was featured in a documentary “Living for 32’’ (the number of dead at Virginia Tech).

Last year on MSNBC, he squared off against Texas state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, sponsor of the guns-on-campus bill. He also wore a hidden camera to gun shows in cities across America, including San Antonio and Fort Worth, to illustrate how easy it is to legally purchase weapons with “no tax, no paperwork, no nothing’’ as one private seller in San Antonio put it.

Goddard’s outspokenness has earned him a reputation as the gun-control advocate that gun-rights supporters love to hate.

“This F******. . . Collin Goddard wants to destroy a whole country’s Constitutional Rights by fooling people to believe that more restrictions will make us safer,’’ said one online comment to Goddard.

“Colin, stop letting Brady pimp you like a cheap hooker,’’ said another in an anonymous letter.

Goddard brushes off most of the criticism as the cost of being outspoken. But the one that stings the most goes something like: If you’d had a gun that day at Virginia Tech, you would have walked out of Norris Hall without a scratch, all your classmates would be alive and you’d be a hero.

“I would love to think I could have saved the day,’’ Goddard said, recalling how many times he’s played alternate scenarios out in his mind. But even if he had a gun, “there’s no way I can say `yes, I would have saved people.’’’

On the broader issue of whether more people carrying more guns would put an end to random shootings, Goddard cited the statistic of 300 million guns in the United States, just about one for every resident.

“How many more hundred million (guns) do we need before things become safer for everybody?’’ he said. “I don’t get it.’’